[BRIEF NOTE] On doing drag on Pride

Well, not real drag in the sense of adopting another gender. But I was inspired by a Facebooker's comment on the video of a Eurythmics song being drag did inspire me to try something new.

Jerry took the below picture of me in full uniform.



Below, in lower webcam resolution, is the hat. You can see the rainbow-coloured lei wrapped around the top here.



A couple of weeks ago, I posted the official video of the 1987 Eurythmics song ""Beethoven (I Love to Listen To)" to my Facebook account.

Let me quote Wikipedia's description of the video.

As the first part of this loose narrative, the "Beethoven" video begins with Lennox portraying a repressed, middle-class housewife, knitting in her apartment. She exhibits characteristics of obsessive-compulsive disorder through her habitual cleaning and chopping of vegetables. The video also includes a mischievous little girl who has blonde hair, and a man who is wearing make-up and an evening gown, neither of whom are directly noticed by the housewife even though they are in her living room with her. These characters are seemingly components of a new character that the dowdy housewife becomes as she has a nervous breakdown and transforms herself into a blonde, overtly sexual vixen. In this new extroverted persona, she then trashes the apartment that, as a housewife, she meticulously kept clean. The video ends with her walking out into the street laughing.

One commenter, Jonathan, said that this video showed Annie Lennox in drag. It was a special type of drag, though. She was not impersonating a gender different from her biological sex, not impersonating a male (though she has done that on ome occasions); rather, she adopted in the video a model of gendered behaviour, that of an entirely conventional housewife doing the sorts of entirely conventional things that inspired Betty Friedan to write about the housewife's despair, that Lennox has never adopted in her public persona. It's somewhat subversive of her image, her audience knows this, and they expect it to collapse.

That got me to thinking. I normally dress fairly conservatively and unimaginatively. (Tell me if I'm wrong, people!) Pride is a time when people step outside the norm and doing something ... extravagant. Even over the top.

All I'll say I that I love inexpensive costume shops.

Subversion can be so fun.